Most people think search engines simply “look up” the words you type. Type “best CD rates”, and it outputs a neat list of banks with interest rates. But under the hood, before any ranking, scoring, or answer-writing happens, your query is subjected to a quiet but critical process: Eligibility Gates. These gates act as pass/fail filters.
Eligibility Gates: The Hidden Filters Behind AI Answers Read More »
A Query Is Not Just Words For decades, search engines treated a query as a handful of words to match. Type “best CD rates” and the machine would go hunting for pages with those exact words. That era is coming to an end. Today, a query is more than a string of words. It’s a
From Words to Answers: How AI Handles Queries and Prompts Read More »
“Let Me Get Right on This” That was my snarky headline for a keynote presentation where I shared an interesting request from a large industry trade group. For more than a decade, marketers have been chasing the mythical easy button. The fantasy goes like this: Back in 2013, this fantasy sounded like “all-in-one SEO dashboards.”
The Myth of AI and the Easy Button Read More »
A Mini Rant Most keyword research guides — and now most prompt-building “frameworks” — make the same mistake: they start with tools. They tell you to plug something into SEMrush, Ahrefs, or ChatGPT and get a list of keywords or prompts. That feels efficient. But those lists reflect what everyone else is doing — not
Forget the hype. Forget the dashboards and “AI SEO kits.” Before you spend a dollar, you need to know one thing: how AI engines describe your brand today. This isn’t about buying tools. It’s about running a quick, no-nonsense test to see your current state. You can do it in 30 minutes with nothing more
The 30-Minute GEO Reality Check Read More »
Why “Help Me Help You” Matters Most goals—whether business, organizational, or personal—depend on others. You can’t just demand action; you need to enable others to succeed in ways that also advance your objectives. This is not manipulation—it’s alignment. The phrase “Help me help you” became famous in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire. In it, Tom
Help Me Help You: The Reciprocity Framework for Getting Things Done Read More »
In an earlier post, I wrote about why employees need to understand why—the importance of knowing the purpose behind the work. This one flips the lens. As consultants (or even internal advisors), we also need to understand why clients and other teams are doing what they do before we can make progress. Here’s the truth:
Epiphany 29: Consultants Need to Understand Why Read More »
During the orientation for the GBA master’s program at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Dean Rachel Kyte told us that during our time in the program, we would develop “the Fletcher Way of Thinking.” I never gave much thought to that statement until I heard it again from other guest
The Fletcher Way of Thinking Read More »
Every SEO has been there. You present a clear fix to a problem, “Put the FDIC disclosure in text on the Certificate Deposit product page”, and instead of agreement, the resistance begins: On the surface, these sound like fair questions. In reality, they’re stall tactics. They’re symptoms of something more profound: organizational drag, the cultural,
The “Whatabout” and “Whydothey” Conundrum: The Challenge of Organizational Drag Read More »
Turning the Signpost Into an Exit Ramp In Part 1, we reframed the collapse of the continuum. In Part 2, we introduced the signpost metaphor: visibility without action is just scenery. Now comes the tactical fix: embed Intent Connectors that transform signposts into exit ramps back into your ecosystem. Now comes the practical question: How
From Zero-Click to Next-Click: How to Build Intent Connectors Read More »